Vision/2017H2

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Meta

This document discusses the high-level vision for D with semestrial granularity. It is released in January and July of each year. Note that the goals presented are those the D leadership works on, explicitly fosters, or strongly believes are important for the success of the D language. Other contributions are always welcome and do not need to be necessarily aligned with this document.

H1 2017 Review

The D Language Foundation

DConf 2017 organized with help from Sociomantic was a success. The number of attendees (over 100) was flat compared to DConf 2016.

Expenses for H1 2017 have averaged at $5600 per month. These include recurring expenses (scholarships, contract payments) as well as one-time items (legal, accounting, travel reimbursements for DConf 2017).

H1 2017 has been flat in total pull requests compared to to H1 2016: 1698 vs. 1702. Of these, 178 are open indicating that reviews are a bottleneck of increasing the PR traffic.

We have added merge rights to three contributors and are looking for more.

The new DIP process is enjoying good success so far with two accepted, one postponed, and two rejected.

Peak 28-day moving average of dmd downloads from the main site has been 1793.14 downloads/day on 2017-04-19. This is lower than our absolute record (2197.39 on 2016-11-18 attributed to Andrei's visit in China) but it is the second all-time best and a 17% increase over the best in H1 2016 (1527.07 2016-05-01).

Safety and Memory Management

Work on safe containers has made significant progress and has prompted improvements to allocators that are still ongoing.

There has been progress but not sufficient to deem the matter addressed.

H2 2017 Priorities

Technical

The three main goals of the remainder of 2017 are:

1. @safety: we aim to enable large-scale uses of D with safety guarantees.

2. @nogc: Use of D without a garbage collector, most likely by using reference counting and related methods Unique/Weak references) for reclamation of resources. This task is made challenging by the safety requirement.

3. Improve interoperability with other languages: Finishing -betterC should improve incremental migration of C and C++.

Of these, the first two are the same as in the first half.

The major D contributors plan to work on a variety of projects related to various degrees to the three high-level goals above:

Static introspection remains an important strategic advantage of D and we should continue to improve both compiler support and library support. The static foreach DIP by Timon Gehr is a major development in the area.